by Barbara Vine
There was a chiming clock somewhere in the labyrinth. One of the family, John himself most likely, had set it going again, and now it tolled out a single sonorous note. It was one hour past midnight. The clock having broken the silence, I felt less apprehensive about doing so and I said good night to John in an even tone.
To my surprise he said, ‘Good night, Shashtin.’ He didn't look up.
I went to bed, leaving any entry I might make in the diary until the next day.
Along with the rest of us, John was invited by Eric to The Studio to view the finished portrait of Winifred. Mrs Cosway refused for him, saying that someone must stay at home with him – why? – and it had better be her since no one else was willing.
‘I don't want to go anyway,’ she said. ‘The last thing one wants is to see the inside of that man's house.’
My previous visit to Felix's home had been back in the summer. Since then large quantities of rubbish had accumulated, mostly in the shape of old newspapers and magazines and empty bottles. Whatever Ella and Winifred did on their visits there, it wasn't cleaning. The place was seriously filthy, a state of affairs which Eric and Winifred seemed to regard as not only normal in a painter or ‘artist’, as they called him, but quite admirable. I doubt if they would have found a like untidiness attractive in me, but I was careful, especially in the vicinity of Felix, to give no hint of my own sketches.
When not a single glass or mug could be found, Eric said that looking for a reasonable standard of hygiene from someone with Felix's gifts would be like expecting housewifely skills from Gauguin. It was in the style of Gauguin rather than Reynolds, which Eric had said he would have preferred, that Winifred's likeness had been painted. She was in raptures, blushing crimson when the dirty piece of cloth – an old curtain? – was drawn aside by Felix and the work revealed.
Perhaps to avoid having to join in the delighted praise, Ella had removed herself to the sink, where she was rinsing out all the cups and mugs she could find under the cold tap, there being no hot water, and showing an intimate knowledge of the household arrangements as she did so. After she had dried them on the only available teacloth, apparently the fellow to the curtain which had been used to cover the portrait, Eric filled the various vessels from the wine bottles he had brought. I would have been very surprised if Felix himself had provided anything for his guests to drink. We drank a toast to the painter, then to the engaged couple, Eric being in his element while all this was going on, finally raising his ‘glass’, a paint-stained mug with a picture of the infant Prince Charles and Princess Anne on its side, to ‘my beautiful bride’.
The portrait, still unframed, was carried back to the Rectory by Eric and Ida, where a cheque in an envelope was handed over. I went too, curious to see it hung. The sign Felix had painted had at last been put up by the gate. His lettering was impeccable. That evening I wrote in the diary that providing this painted signboard was the only good thing Felix Dunsford had done since coming to Windrose and in any case he had been paid for it.
The picture was to be hung over the fireplace in the room Eric called the ‘lounge’, a word which conjured up to me places of cream tweed sofas and cut-glass ashtrays, nothing at all like the Rectory's shabby living room. The portrait, in ivory and reds and purples, brought the only colour. I thought it a poor likeness. It's not to my credit that I never recognized what a good painter Felix was.
‘Shall you like having your own face staring down at everyone when you have guests?’ Ella spoke in dry, almost sarcastic tones. ‘It would embarrass me.’
‘Possibly,’ said Winifred, ‘but it's not your portrait and you're not going to live here.’
I remembered what Ella had said about telling Eric and for a moment I thought she meant to say something which would make the situation clear. But she only continued to stare at her sister. Eric announced that since ‘the sun was over the yard-arm’ we should all have a drink, though what little sun there was had been nowhere near the yard-arm when we had the wine in The Studio. Winifred seemed far less familiar with the arrangements at the Rectory than with those at Felix's and it was Ida who fetched a tray laden with bottles and took glasses out of a gloomy heavily carved sideboard. Meanwhile, Winifred stood in front of the portrait, which was balanced on the brown marble mantelpiece, staring at her own face with doting narcissism.
It was the day after that when the snow began. I was used to snow. We in Sweden seldom passed a winter without it and sometimes it fell for months on end. In England, it seemed to me, everyone hoped to get through the winter without snow, but if it must come, let it be at Christmas. A white Christmas was what they wanted. After that it could go away until next year. Things seldom worked out like that but this year they did, at least as far as the snow at Christmas went.
There is a belief, almost universal, that the temperature rises when it snows. This is a myth, as one of my children doing a meteorology course told me. I believe it got colder with the snow that year. At Lydstep Old Hall fires were lit in fireplaces which had held no coal or wood for decades. Ella drove into Sudbury and, with grudging consent from Mrs Cosway, bought electric heaters. Wrapped in blankets and eiderdowns, wearing woollen gloves, John did his Descartes act and sat in the airing cupboard day after day. Lydstep Old Hall had become a grey house with a white roof, desolate and sad to look at, its windows glassy black eyes. It was hard to tell if Zorah was there or not. To protect the shining bodywork of the Lotus, she put it away in one of the barns no one had used for half a century.
‘She's ended it,’ Ella said to me. ‘Winifred, I mean. When the portrait was finished, that was the end. I expect she said so. I expect she told him that with the last brush stroke that was the last time. I shall never forgive her, never. But she looks miserable, doesn't she?’
I found it hard to agree. To me she looked much the same as usual. Nor did I believe Ella. I saw no reason to think Winifred had ended anything.
‘She knows she's got to marry Eric. It's her fate. Besides, if she doesn't she thinks Ida would.’
‘Surely Eric himself would have some say in it.’
She shrugged. ‘What do you think of the doll?’
It was in the pink silk of the bridesmaids' dresses and holding a bouquet of tiny artificial rosebuds. I said it was very nice but I must have sounded vague. I was thinking of Ida and Eric. Eric and Ida – how much more suitable that would have been than the present arrangement.
My second proposal came in the following week. It was from John Cosway.
*
If the cold had continued he might never have made it for he was always in the airing cupboard or otherwise directing his energies to keeping himself warm. But mildness returned with heavy rain and Winifred went about saying it was more like August than December, a wet August. When John emerged he began to spend long hours in the library, perhaps making the best of the warmer weather before the cold that was sure to come drove him back upstairs again. But in the late afternoon he usually returned to his chair in the drawing room where Mrs Cosway always was and where Ida, still aproned and harassed, would drop on to the sofa for occasional ten-minute breaks before rushing off back to housework.
Whatever Winifred had said, the temperature was far from anything this country saw in August and Ida had always lit a fire in this room. One of the advantages of central heating is that one can spend time in any room one chooses, while in its absence there is no alternative to sitting as close as possible to the only fire in the house. I had been helping Ida sort out two large cardboard boxes full of sadly shabby Christmas decorations, deciding which could be used again and which disposed of, but this more or less done, both of us were in the drawing room, Mrs Cosway was lying on the sofa and John was standing at the end of it, in front of the console table, with his gloved hands on the rounded body of the Roman vase. His mother watched him in a fretful way as if she feared he would break it. Winifred had just come in. She was brimming with excitement, the result no doubt of an afternoon with Felix,
and I had a sudden fear that she wouldn't be able to contain herself but would break out into some wild exhilarated confession.
Nothing like that happened. Ida got up to make the tea, I said I would help, and as I got to my feet, John said, ‘Will you marry me, Shashtin?’
As a high-functioning autistic, he had simply expressed a desire, as he always did, and because he knew nothing of tact or discretion or that this request is always made in private, was without normal inhibitions, had no shyness or care for the usages of the world, he had expressed it in the presence of three other people. At that time, I had never had a shock like it. I don't know that I have since. I was simply dumbstruck. The awful silence was broken by Winifred, whose pent-up excitement burst out of her in a shriek of laughter and the worst question she could have asked.
‘Marry you? Are you mad?’
They thought he was. Mrs Cosway said, ‘Ignore it. The best thing to do is ignore it,’ and she turned on me eyes full of anger.
I thought then and wrote in the diary that evening that if I did what she asked I would have to live with this cowardice for the rest of my life, I would never forget it, I would never get over it. In a voice that I am sure sounded strangled, I said, ‘Thank you very much, John, but I'm afraid the answer is no.’
He said nothing. Whether there was some peculiarity in me which brought tears into my eyes when I am proposed to, I don't know, but again I felt like crying. I could do that in Mark's room but not here and I made an enormous effort to control myself, clenching my fists and driving my nails into the palms of my hands.
I could see no change in John's expression, no danger there of his feeling a similar distress to my own. Mrs Cosway now turned and addressed her daughters.
‘That's why he wanted her. I always suspected it. What other reason could there be for his asking for a young woman to help me? Ostensibly to help me. Anyone would have done, of course.’ She turned to me. ‘I don't know how you've been making up to him. I don't want to know. You may care to hear it would have made no difference. He was obviously set on this from the start.’
Was he? Had he really only asked the trust for help for his mother in order to have a girl in the house to marry? Perhaps. I would never know. His motive in wishing to marry anyone was hard to imagine, unless he saw marriage as a way of escape from this place. He wasn't mad, even then I was quite certain of that, but there was no doubt he was very different from other men of his age. Could he love? Did he love anything or anyone but that vase and perhaps Zorah? And if so, was it remotely possible he loved me?
All this passed through my mind, though not till later. After the things Mrs Cosway had said, gross insults and intended as such, I walked out of the room and went into the kitchen. There I busied myself with putting the kettle on, setting cups and saucers out on a tray, and finding a cake and some biscuits. It was still too cold to use the dining room until the electric heater had warmed it for an hour or two. After a blankness in my head which lasted a full minute, I began to ask myself what John thought marriage was. What did anyone who screamed when he was touched think marriage was? Was I only to be his silent companion and servant or did he believe our coming together would unlock in him reserves of self-expression and social interaction? But I realized I was attributing to him thoughts and feelings he could never have had. Possibly he believed he wanted to be married because there was so much talk of marriage with Winifred's wedding only a month away. Then there came back into my mind the dreadful question she had asked him.
‘Are you mad?’
I sat down at the table and when Ida came scurrying in, the hated tears had begun. She looked at me and shrugged.
‘Goodness knows what all that was about.’
‘I don't want any tea,’ I said and I went upstairs to my room, wondering how I was going to face John later and, come to that, the rest of them.
22
But for Mark's proposal and my refusal, I would have left Lydstep Old Hall that very evening. But I couldn't go to the man I had said no to and tell him I had changed my mind and would he take me in? And there was another reason for staying. Along with my refusal of John, I had found myself feeling tender towards him in a way I had never been before. Though I could do nothing for him while I was there except respect him and his wishes, I felt there would be a kind of betrayal in deserting him just when what he had asked me seemed to indicate a need I had never before suspected.
So I forced myself to come down that evening and the next day and the next and try to behave as if nothing had happened. This was hard because Mrs Cosway seemed to blame me for John's behaviour, while several times I caught Winifred staring at me in wonder as if she was amazed by her brother's choice or was speculating as to what I had done to deserve it. Perhaps she, like her mother, thought my red hair a grave disadvantage in the attraction stakes. Ella had heard, probably from her, about John's very public proposal and was so enthralled by the whole idea that she wanted to talk about it all the time, trying to lure me with offers of rosé and chocolates to her room, where I was expected to analyse John's feelings and my own. I resisted most of it but the very act of resistance made me tired and exasperated.
The cold weather came back and we had a heavy snowfall. Driving was impossible until the snow-ploughs came out and cleared the roads. I was used to snow at home and had brought a pair of padded waterproof boots with me, new to English eyes and pronounced by Winifred to be ‘not very elegant’. These boots enabled me to get down into Windrose and do the shopping, which I brought up from the village on an old toboggan I found in one of the outbuildings and dragged up the hill behind me. Apart from the kitchen boiler, the open fire in the drawing room and the two new electric heaters, Lydstep Old Hall was now to be heated by paraffin stoves, fetched by Ida from the ‘boot room’. I had never before seen anything like these black cylinders that Mrs Cosway called ‘lamps' and which were fuelled by paraffin. This was among the items I was asked to bring back from the village, told by Ida to buy the kind which was coloured pink because blue paraffin smelt. The pink smelt quite strongly enough to me. Its powerful chemical reek, even less pleasant than the smell of petrol, spread through the whole house with no chance of escape as all the windows were kept firmly shut against the cold. Mrs Cosway switched off the ‘electric fires’, as she called them, whenever she was near one, on the principle that using them would overload the system and the house would catch fire.
No one else went out. In a way I thought opposed to all her usual habits, Mrs Cosway built up her strength by flexing the foot she had injured and describing circles with both feet. It was a kind of physiotherapy formulated by herself and it seemed to work. She had always been thin and upright. Now her strength was coming back. She told Winifred this was a regime for getting herself fit for the wedding. Winifred received all such remarks and good wishes with indifference, barely smiling. If anyone pressed the point she said, ‘Let's get Christmas over first.’
A lot of people I encountered on my shopping trips to Windrose talked like this, making the feast which I had always loved into a burden and speaking about it as if it were an ordeal to get through before the business of normal living could resume. Only Ella spoke of Christmas with a childlike thrill in her voice. As the cold intensified and, after a brief thaw, nightly frosts closed in on us, John sought refuge in the airing cupboard or, with two paraffin heaters in the drawing room and the fire built up high, huddled himself inside a sleeping bag Ella had found in one of those rooms off the kitchen I had passed through on my first morning there. He never again referred to his proposal. He took no more or less notice of me than he had ever done. This didn't stop Mrs Cosway taking up a station by his chair when her pacing was over for the day. She brought an upright chair for herself and sat there, stitching at the tapestry, as if protecting him from some onslaught I might make.
One evening when I went into the dining room to switch on the electric heater half an hour before dinner, Winifred was in there making a phone call. I l
eft the room at once but not before I had seen from her guilty look and darting eyes that Ella was wrong and she had been telling Mike at the Rose that this was Tamara with a message for Felix. Zorah too stayed at home, though scarcely showing herself. A male friend of hers appeared, turning up in a jeep-like vehicle high above the snow. She must have given him a key to the house for, though I saw him arrive, the front-door bell never rang and no one came to let him in. Late that evening, when I went up to bed, I heard laughter from behind her door and the sound of music. There was a heavy fall of snow that night and the visitor's car, buried in a drift, became an igloo by morning. He stayed up there with Zorah for another twenty-four hours, finally dug his car out on Christmas Eve and drove away.
This had always been Christmas to me, as it is in much of the continent of Europe, and it came as a surprise, and not a pleasant one, to find that in England it was nothing more than the eve of the Great Feast. A time of last-minute preparations, cooking, present-wrapping, cake-decorating, table-laying, but not of festivity. Eric came, bringing Felix with him, and the two of them joined Winifred in the kitchen to drink sherry while she mixed stuffing, iced the cake and made crumbs from a white loaf for bread sauce. I went out there at one point to fetch a hot drink for Mrs Cosway and found Winifred flushed and laughing, obviously excited at being the focus of attention for not one but two men, she who until quite recently had been on the shelf and heading for old maidhood.
‘The silent guy’, as Felix always referred to John, had begun to treat him with antagonism. This would have mattered not at all but for Winifred's determination that her brother and her lover must like each other. I have noticed this phenomenon since in families, when a woman is so besotted with a boyfriend that she expects all her relations and everyone she knows to admire him as she does. But with a man like John, certainly not insane but suffering from a peculiar mental condition, she ought to have known better. She had no more chance of success with John than she had with her mother. At least Mrs Cosway was coldly polite to Felix. John could only express his true feelings, egocentric, indifferent to others' sensibilities, insensitive, isolationist, for this was Asperger's unchangeable nature. I believe Winifred still thought, as I once had, that now the medication was in the past, he would gradually become like everyone else.